I really don't want to do dailies every day.
I guess you might like this... The developers are currently planning to include bonus reputation that can be earned via scenarios and dungeons. It doesn't necessarily mean it'll be through tabards and in the exact same way as back in the days, but sounds close enough to what you want!

I really don't want to do dailies for coins either, why can't we just get them from HC's as well?
Actually, not from heroics, but the developers are planning to let you have a chance to earn Lesser Charms of Good Fortune through Pet Battles. Basically, if you win, you'll have a chance of receiving charms based on your pet level.

And if a player is below level 90, they'll get experience equal to defeating a yellow creature.

Patch 5.2 - New World Boss
Previously the developers have mentioned that they learned a lot from the new Mists of Pandaria world bosses and would add more in a future patch. It seems we may see a new one in Patch 5.2!

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Item Upgrades and Item Level
Items that have been upgraded do count and contribute towards increasing your character's overall average item level. However, keep in mind that with 15-16 item slots; increasing a single item's level by +4/8 may not be sufficient to make an immediate impact. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Maybe I didn't express myself very clearly. Here's the full quote:Also, bad graphics is very subjective, if you mean it in technical terms, everything will always end up having bad graphics, it’s only a matter of time. If you mean the art itself is bad, then that’s a valuable opinion, but opinions are highly subjective, and I have to say I strongly disagree.

What I meant to say is that in technical terms, it's simply a matter of time until any kind of graphics is considered bad/out dated. But graphics as in the “artwork” is something quite different; it has an intrinsic value that doesn’t degrade over time. That's why lots of people still play Mario, Puzzle Bobble, Pac-Man... and they still love the artwork and gameplay.

Lately it seems that quite a lot of games tend to be all about who has the biggest textures and latest shaders, that's an illusion that usually manages to hide the lack of innovation and real gameplay value.

Now, of course, graphics are also important and that's why we upgrade our engine from time to time, especially if it will make it more efficient and give players a better performance, but I'd still like to think that what players value the most is the gameplay, originality and innovation.

There is also an issue with changing something that is considered classic, and in my opinion, WoW verges on that. A lot of players would dislike major changes to the artwork, so when we upgrade our graphics engine, we need to be careful to make sure it doesn’t change the classic visuals that much. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

New Character Models
Actually... the development team is working on new character models for the vanilla races. Unfortunately, we don't have an estimate yet on when they'll be available. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Taste for Blood Nerf
No one likes to see nerfs being done to their class, unfortunately it’s one of those things that a game like WoW is always subject to, and there are just too many variables, limited resources and schedules to keep.
So sometimes we have to hotfix stuff, the problem is that players will always get used to the “overpowered” abilities, and when the nerf comes the disappointment is inevitable.

As you can imagine this is definitely not in our interest, we want our players to have fun; this is a game after all.

The problem is that when someone is “having fun” due to having an overpowered ability or class/spec, that usually comes at the cost of someone else feeling miserable when they realize that there’s nothing that they can do to counter such class/spec/ability.

So ideally we would like to have a perfectly balanced game without having to hotfix anything at all, this way no one would have to miss being overpowered and then feel mad after being nerfed, there would also be no need for anyone to ever feel underpowered as well. Sadly this is too idealistic, but it’s a noble goal that we always like to have in the back of our minds when we design our games.

Let’s get to the point, Taste for Blood wasn’t overpowered in itself, yes it hit very hard, but like you said, Chaos Bolt hits very hard as well, so why the nerf? Well TfB is tied to Heroic Strike and that makes it particularly dangerous because it’s out of the CGD.

If you’re casting a Chaos Bolt you can be interrupted, you have to stand still, you can lose LoS and it has a somewhat long casting time.

Now if you’re a warrior and the stars align, you can have 5 stacks of TfB, Mortal Strike + Heroic Strike + Auto Attack + mastery proc all in the very same instant, that can literally be a 1-shot and that is something that we don’t want to see happening in PvP, it’s just not acceptable.

Taking out 50% of HP from someone can be ok as long as you can’t take 50% of HP followed by an equivalent powerful attack from the same source, the enemy needs to have enough time to land a heal or recover is some other way before you take the rest of his HP, this is where skill comes in, if you’re able to stop that player from recovering during that time, then well played!

I’m not saying that PvP is perfectly tuned right now, I’m sure that we will have more hotfixes coming in the near future, devs are constantly analysing data and listening to your feedback and they will keep trying to bring the game closer to a state of perfect balance as best and as fast as they possibly can.

If Taste for Blood capping at 1 stack proves to be an excessively strong nerf, you can be sure that devs will catch it when they analyse fresh new data, if that happens they can always change TfB again directly or make up for the nerf in some other way, like buffing some other ability or indirectly by bringing the other classes that might be too powerful to the same level as the warrior. In the end the goal is simply balance, and there is an infinite number of ways to get there.

I guess my question is, why do developers say they're content with something and defend their decision not to change it, then suddenly find it 'unacceptable' and change it?
There’s a saying in my country that says “only fools never change their minds”.

Developers are not machines, they do their very best at trying to design the game as balanced as possible, it’s true that some opinions can be very strong sometimes, but the values that are initially attributed to constants and variables in the formulas for most abilities are not simply made up on the spot, there’s extensive math involved there and sometimes it’s only natural that one can trust the math a bit too strongly, the problem is that sometimes math doesn’t directly translate to a live gaming environment, so an ability/spell can look absolutely perfect on paper and in a simulation but still end up being horribly tuned for certain PvP situations because simulating 11 classes, 34 specs, talents, glyphs, and human behaviour all at the same time is never easy.

This game is incredibly vast and we need a lot of resources, proper data, and a good amount of samples to be able to really check out all the facts, constant data analysis and listening to reliable feedback can have a tremendous effect in catalysing and accelerating changes being applied to the game because it can point devs in the right direction, thus saving our most precious asset, time.

If you look at the rate of constant hotfixes and patches that we release, you can’t really say that devs are stubborn, if anything, WoW must be one of the most iterated games of all time, it’s in a permanent state of change, constantly adapting to the needs and requirements of the present time, that means that devs are quite open minded and are always ready to listen to facts and the opinions of others, also remember that most of them are also players so they have the same experience that you do, they want to make this game the best that it can possibly be, both as players and as developers, and that’s a tough combination to beat if you ask me.

Almost no one can have a grasp over everything in WoW, it’s simply that vast. This game is a beast.

If we ever appear to be locked into some fixed idea it’s because there must be a very strong reason for it, and also because applying changes always takes time, quality control is particularly important, we want to avoid applying changes and then going back and forth regretting about them later on, so time for proper testing is extremely important for assuring reliability. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

EU Battle.net Authenticators Temporarily Unavailable

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

From December 17 2012, physical products including Battle.net Authenticators will be temporarily unavailable on the Blizzard Online Store in Europe. This is in preparation for a revamp of the store which will take place during 2013. In the meantime, many items can be found on the US Blizzard Store.

Players wishing to acquire a Battle.net Authenticator have several options. The Battle.net Mobile Authenticator is available for many types of smartphone, and you can find out more about it here. For many people, this is the easiest and cheapest option!

If you prefer to have a physical Battle.net Authenticator, you can get hold of one from several sources including the online retailers and high-street stores listed here.

They spent a lot of time in Phase 1 having the Mutated Construct cast Amber Strike to apply the Destabilize debuff. This is apparently allowed to stack up to 255 times, greatly increasing the amount of damage the boss takes.

During the short period of time at the start of Phase 2 before the Amber Monstrosity arrives and shields the boss with Amber Carapace, you can do a very high amount of damage and kill the boss, skipping the rest of the fight.

The Daily Blink - I Don’t Wanna Get Off On a Rant Here...The Daily Blink responds to some recent posts about World PvP. The full comic is too long to embed here, click it to see the entire thing!

On my server Galleon spawns on Wednesday every week, at about 05:00-06:00 AM, shortly after the weekly reset. But if there's a maintenance in the morning, he'll spawn after the maintenance ends.
That's really bad :/

He spawned three times last week on my server. The battles that ensued... Especially the one last night. Horde got it, of course, they always do, but we put up one hell of a fight. Took them three tries to get it, we wiped them on 1.5mill on their first try, and then on 150k on their second.

Zerg strat, they don't get 255 stacks. They get around 60 or so. You can't stack the debuff indefinitely because the player who is the construct does like 200k dmg a whack, and eventually you'd push the boss into phase 2.

I'm sure they'll just make it so he interrupts his scapel cast when p2 would trigger.

Originally Posted by Znuff

You don't DPS the boss...

Also, it's on HEROIC, where it takes significantly more damage to push him to P2.

You are DPSing the boss though, the strike that applies the debuff does quite a bit of damage.

In Vanilla and all the way through Burning crusade, that was usually called a challenge. A taunting motion for the opposing faction to bring their goons and thugs to put a smackdown on the gankers. But since people are extremely lazy nowadays, since they play for rewards and not for laughs and great moments, no one rises up and stomps the ganker in the face. Instead we bitch and moan.
This is how some of the greatest World pvp battles of all time started, and now it's called griefing just because people are lazy to retaliate?

Interesting how time changes a game and it's playerbase.

It really does make you think that instead of adapting to the new needs of the playerbase, or indeed actually steering them, Blizzard have just slapped on CRZ in the hopes of bringing back the glory days of vanilla without acknowledging the fact the game has changed to point where World PvP= ganking, and Blizzard are the biggest culprits in this change. Even in WotLK when everyone was sitting in Dalaran hitting their button for insta queue instance ports Hillsbrad and STV and other places could see some intra-guild battles erupting, albeit rarely compared to vanilla standards and then the Cataclysm happens to segregate both factions in such a way that a levelling character could conceivably reach Hellfire Pen without even seeing a member of the opposite faction. You can't change the game in one direction and then hope that people will be happy when you half assedly change your mind back. Even in Panderia, with all their liittle tweaks made by Blizz to promote World PvP shows a lack of real understanding of the current mood of the playerbase as I think I've seen World PvP (Halfhill excepting) all of three times in Panderia since MoP was released; people just want their dailys done and then they want to GTFO. Hell, instead of World PvP I think MoP has brung an unprecedented level of co-operation between players of the opposite factions. World PvP was a thing, but it's day is long done. I wish Blizz would let it die gracefully instead of changing the game because of a rose tinted memories of a bygone age and the The Daily Blink unusually misses the mark on this issue.

You made yourself look like an entitled fool. Honestly what do you need charms and the best gear for if you dont like raiding? Charms can only be used in raids, heroics and scenario's can be done wearing blues.

I would like to know what you plan to do with the charms if you hate raiding? BTW, you can get good gear form doing dailies, dungeons, and scenario's but PET BATTLES!?!? You really think you should be rewarded with the best gear from doing pet battles? That is too funny, maybe they should let us grow epics on our farm too?

i know sarcasm is hard to see over the internet.. but the 'see what i did there' should have spelled it out for the intellectually impaired. What i did was reversed the fortune. People seem to think that they're 'forced' to do the OPTIONAL content (when in all actuality its ALL optional). I would like to thank you for emphasizing my point though, it does sound quite stupid. Just as stupid as the people who are using the opposite.

oh, and lol @ forcing us to do dailies or f...... s... pet battles LOL

You are not forced to do a single thing. It is for people who like to pet battle and would rather do that than run dailies for lesser charms. But if you went out and got exalted with all of the major factions then you shouldn't need to run any dailies at all for the next 3 months. My druid has over 1000 lesser charms. The only dailies I run on him now are Tiller. At the rate I'm going it's going to take me about 9 months to run out of lesser charms.

On my priest I am going to reach my limit in about 2 months, at which point I'll have a choice on what I want to do to replenish my charms. Before I was dreading running dailies on factions that I don't need. You see my priest is Holy/Disc and doing dailies is a pain in the ass sometimes. But now with these changes I'll have the option to do pet battles.

You can play the exact same way you did in Cata by the way. Yeah there are bonuses for doing dailies, but hey if you hate them that much...

Then you didn't understand the complaints about the rep gain options this time. Either that or you're one of those people that want to make the game tedious enough to make those who you don't want to be playing the game quit. Either way, it's a fail argument because it's not the argument.

Aside from the gating of two factions and crafting patterns that could be pretty damn important to guilds and raiders (making them seem like they were necessary anyway even though Blizz had the intentions otherwise), it's the thing that we were pigeon holed into dailies if we wanted to grind rep. No one was ever saying "bring back tabards" (though, again, those playing the pathetic elitist vs. casual war the way they do will try to say that that's what is being said anyway because they have a nasty ulterior motive with wanting things to stay the way they are now).

However, when you put things in that players see as necessary (like high end enchants and crafting patterns) behind factions that are gated behind another faction that takes weeks to grind to the appropriate level and whose dailies are so tediously boring and take you to a ridiculously cramped and heavily contested spot on the map to do them, and then you take away all other avenues to get the rep (even those that were acceptable in TBC, which is viewed by elitists to be THE expansion), then don't think through that people might have a lot of alts that they want to take to 90 as well, and you create a problem that has no easy solution.

Plus, no one bought that Blizz was doing that for the reasons Blizz gave. They had a faction that they wanted to shove down our throats because they thought it was the best story line they ever did. The Golden Lotus and Klaxxi had backlash because there were just too many dailies, the places to do them in were way too crowded and cramped, the mobs were pretty tough to kill, the dailies themselves were just boring to have to do, and the rep gains from each one didn't justify the work you put into doing them. The Shado Pan, Tillers, and AC ones were much better, I think, because they didn't take as long to do, they didn't provide you with an endless daily quest line that at the end of it didn't make you wonder if you even made a dent in your rep gains, the dailies were more interesting (I like when the AC takes me to the White Temple, for example), and it wasn't as cramped or tougher than it had to be (I like a challenge, too, but I want the difficulty to make sense).

And to be honest, this upcoming change IS giving us what they did in TBC (think Thrallmar rep), which is what they should've done to begin with. It gives us another avenue for those that would like to get the rep and wouldn't mind doing the grinds to do them (nor minds the wait), but are groaning at how they mismanaged their obsession with the dailies.

I know that, i just think Blizzard needs to be faster at getting big problems adressed.

Anyone can make a mistake with good intentions, but a big company like Blizzard should be faster adressing them.

The problem is that Blizzard has by far the largest MMO in the industry. With 10 million players you have to make sure that what you put out is as good as it can be. The last thing you wanna do is make something worse in the attempt of fixing it.

---------- Post added 2012-12-19 at 05:39 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Tedsterz

Blizzard finally caved into the people who constantly complained about dailies.

GG guys -.-

The thing about the coins was actually valid enough. Blizzard likes to have things obtainable from more than one playstyle. Currently the coins are exclusively available to people doing daily quests. So I don't have a problem with them changing it.

The problem is that Blizzard has by far the largest MMO in the industry. With 10 million players you have to make sure that what you put out is as good as it can be. The last thing you wanna do is make something worse in the attempt of fixing it.[COLOR="red"]

True, but you cant take 4months+ on LIVE to fix important problems. There needs to be a middle ground. Feedback about dailies going to be a problem was given in Beta, even when it wasnt such a big problem because in Beta there were no VP gear attached to them.

It took too long to acknowledge the problems in cata, it took to long to do so in MoP IMO too.

That was in BETA. PvP and PvE realms aren't even in the same cross realm zone pool, Blizzard repeatedly stated that.

This happened frequently on Live as well. It hasn't happened to me personally recently, but when CRZ first dropped, it was pretty frequent. Blizzard may have stated it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen frequently. Any CRZ problems are usually buried, if you search the forums, you'll still find several posts where they claim to have fixed the pvp on pve problems, they do seem to have got it now at least.